Center Isaiah Hartenstein intends to sign a three-year, $75 million contract extension with the Oklahoma City Thunder, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. 

Approaching his third season with the organization, Hartenstein has become a fixture in Oklahoma City’s rotation. Over the past two seasons, he started 97 of his 104 regular-season appearances, as well as all 23 games in the Thunder’s run to a 2025 NBA championship. He averaged 9.2 points and 9.4 rebounds this past season, furthering his role beside fellow big man Chet Holmgren.

Hartenstein, the No. 4 free agent in John Hollinger’s rankings, originally had a $28.5 million team option for next season, the third of a three-year free-agent contract he signed in 2024. Oklahoma City will instead ink him at a similar annual rate for next season and add two more years to his deal, ensuring he remains a fixture for a championship-contending core.

The Thunder have been active this offseason to create more financial flexibility to welcome Hartenstein back. In the past week, they traded guards Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe to the Atlanta Hawks and Detroit Pistons, respectively, shedding their contracts to try to duck under the NBA’s punitive second-apron threshold.

Hartenstein has played a large role in the Thunder’s league-best defense the past couple seasons. At 7-foot and 250 pounds, his sturdiness and below-the-rim physicality proved especially useful when defending Spurs center Victor Wembanyama in the West finals.

Hartenstein’s passing and screening have helped transform the Thunder offense and introduced new wrinkles build around his playmaking from the high post. He has also given back-to-back MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander a bruising screener.

A former second-round pick, the 28-year-old opened his career bouncing between four teams in four seasons — Houston, Denver, Cleveland and the L.A. Clippers — while starting just six games in that span. He signed with the New York Knicks in 2022 and became integral in their rise over the next two seasons. With his combination of rebounding, rim protection, physicality and playmaking, Hartenstein became a coveted big man target during the summer of 2024. He, along with Alex Caruso, became one of the Thunder’s two marquee veteran acquisitions before their title run.

The pick is in.

With the No. 3 pick at the 2026 NHL Draft in Buffalo on Friday evening, the Vancouver Canucks selected Brantford Bulldogs center Caleb Malhotra.

Malhotra, 18, is the son of Canucks head coach Manny Malhotra. While that introduces some potential for awkwardness, incoming Canucks general manager Ryan Johnson had consistently stated that he was unwilling to “sacrifice” on selecting the best player available on draft day simply because Caleb’s father was his first pick to be Vancouver’s head coach.

“We had one conversation before I hired him,” Johnson said of discussing the draft with Manny in a pre-draft media briefing on Thursday, while discussing the unprecedented situation. “(We) agreed that if it were going to be an issue that (Manny and the team) should both go our separate ways. And we decided it wasn’t an issue.”

Malhotra wasn’t on the radar as a top draft prospect entering this season, but authored a significant offensive breakout while jumping from the BCHL to the OHL and had emerged as the consensus top center in the class. Standing 6-foot-2, Malhotra is a long, athletic and physically assertive center whose offensive game is mostly built around his creativity as a playmaker. While Malhotra wasn’t a face-off ace in the OHL this past season – a reality which may take some time for fans to wrap their head around, given what we remember of how his dad played – he is a diligent, hard-working defensive presence with the tools and reach to be a disruptive two-way presence at the professional level.

NHL scouts are high on Malhotra, not just because of what he can do on the ice, but because of what he represents as a person off of it.

“Caleb Malhotra’s greatest asset, as good as his hockey sense and his speed and size is, is his character,” an anonymous NHL scout told The Athletic of Malhotra’s game in May. “He’s got elite character. I could see him captaining an NHL team someday, and you’re seeing it, his production in big games has gone to another level. He’s been dynamite in the playoffs, and if there was any question with Caleb, it was would he be the same as his dad and not be able to produce numbers at the NHL level. I don’t think that will be a concern.”

There’s also an element to which NHL teams heavily weigh how significantly Malhotra improved over the course of his draft year, and that’s a big part of what the Canucks are betting on. Malhotra has never been a top offensive producer as a teenager, until the past six months. That rocket-ship trajectory, however, is baked into the bet that Vancouver has placed on Friday.

“The trajectory on the player has been pretty dramatic,” another anonymous NHL scout told The Athletic ahead of the draft lottery. “He was in the BCHL last season, and it’s not that he wasn’t a difference-maker, but he didn’t really dominate. Then he wasn’t invited to the Ivan Hlinka camp, and part of that might’ve been that he went to the BCHL, but when you see him in September in the OHL as a true rookie, and compare him now to what he was then, you see a massive difference. I think that’s exciting.

“A recent example of a player who took that sort of leap is Beckett Senneke, about halfway through his draft year, you were just shocked. Senneke played as a 16-year-old in the OHL, and he was super frustrating … Even in his draft year, there were games where he struggled or where he was healthy scratched or benched. Then you saw him from January onward, and he just figured it out. Caleb’s progression is, he starts as a 17-year-old in the OHL and every time you saw him, he just looked bigger and stronger and better.”

A deep dive into Malhotra’s draft year production reveals that while he didn’t produce at the level that we’d customarily expect of a top-five pick drafted out of the OHL in his draft year, when you adjust for pedigree and draft capital, he’s got a relatively low-risk profile from a production perspective.

As a big center playing in the OHL, Malhotra represents a player archetype that NHL talent evaluators have a very solid track record of identifying and elevating to the top of the NHL draft order when it’s called for. That holds regardless of whether that player’s scoring profile jumps off of the page, or not.

Malhotra’s selection at No. 3 marks the highest pick that the Canucks have made at the draft since the franchise selected Henrik Sedin – now one of Vancouver’s co-presidents of hockey operations – third in 1999.